Bogged down in Baghdad

Blair and his diplomats tried to get America to take a grip. But the world's only superpower had parcelled out control of the invasion to settle a Washington feud. The Guardian political editor on despair inside No 10

'Do you think we will ever be free of this?" Tony Blair's despairing question to his political secretary Sally Morgan encapsulates the struggle the prime minister faced in spring 2004 as he sought both elusive victory in Iraq and a chance for the public to look again at his government's overall record. "Is everything going to be seen through the prism of this?" he agonised.

Different aides put the Blair wobble - the moment he genuinely considered resignation - at different times. Most accept that he hit a barrier in early 2004, after the Hutton report into the death of government scientist David Kelly did not draw a line under allegations of exaggerating the intelligence or taking the country to war on a lie.

Lady Morgan insists there were no delegations of cabinet ministers to raise his morale, rather anxious queries as to whether they should ring him and rally round. One aide said: "He just felt ground down, not by the job of prime minister, but by the internal battles and the delays in anything happening and the sense that Gordon was surrounded by people that did not want to cooperate."

When the full history of Britain and Iraq comes to be written, it will not be familiar arguments about manipulated intelligence, but the misjudgments and lack of proper planning for Iraq after Saddam that will occupy historians.

Arguably the absence of a chemical arsenal and the row over intelligence presentation could have been overcome if the postwar had not been a catalogue of monumental blunders. Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, insists Britain had a plan, but for the wrong outcome: starvation, refugees' movements and burning oilfields.

In the US there has been serious analysis of the calamity of postwar planning. In more secretive Whitehall, little has been written about Britain's role in postwar administration and Blair's influence on US thinking. One of those best placed to give that account, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, has been muzzled by the government.

The memoirs of Sir Jeremy, ambassador to the UN during the passing of resolutions on Iraq and, between September 2003 and March 2004, British envoy to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), will not be published for years. Yet on the lecture circuit, in the thinktanks and in interviews he has disclosed the vain efforts the government made - always in private - to get America to take a grip.

"They thought they had more time, more control and more momentum than they had," he argued last month. "The combination of the failure to construct an absolutely solid security base for Iraq immediately after the invasion created a vacuum in law and order. It was quickly moved into by a range of people - the Ba'athists, the terrorists, mainly non-Iraqi people, the criminals that Saddam left out of jail the year before, but increasingly and most damagingly, an insurgency that did not believe the coalition should be there."

Key to the disaster may have been George Bush's decision in January 2003 to settle a feud between the state and defence departments by letting the Pentagon take sole charge. Britain had been liaising with Thomas Warrick only to find, two months before invasion, Donald Rumsfeld had taken him off the case.

A British official said: "I think we had no idea just how dysfunctional the US administration was ... You have to assume that when you are dealing with the world's only superpower they have a plan, that they have got it all tied up, but they did not. It was just incredibly thin, misanalysed and ill-conceived. One of our many difficulties is that we were talking to George Bush, and it emerged he was not in charge of either the strategic and tactical decisions.

"What Iraq needed was a MacArthur figure, and the only person that could have provided it was General Tommy Franks [US commander], but after he reached Baghdad he just detached himself and soon after retired. It needed President Bush to say to him in Washington: 'Brilliant, Tommy, you got to Baghdad and you have got rid of Saddam, but your task is the pacification of the country and you are not coming home or retiring until September at earliest.' The war was lost not in months of the invasion, but in days."

Two months before the invasion Rumsfeld had chosen a retired general, Jay Garner, as civilian administrator. The chain of command from Garner and Franks to Rumsfeld was never clear. Arriving 10 days after Baghdad fell, lacking phones and cars, and out of their depth, Garner's team struggled to make an impact.

John Sawers, the Foreign Office political director, was sent by Blair to work alongside Garner. A great advocate of the special relationship, his hair-raising cable arrived at No 10 on May 9: "Four days in Iraq has been enough to identify the main reasons why the reconstruction effort is so slow. The coalition are widely welcomed, but are gradually losing public support. Garner's outfit is an unbelievable mess. No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis. Garner and his top team of 60-year-old retired generals are well meaning but out of their depth. No progress is possible until security improves. A big part of the problem is the third infantry division. (A 17,000 strong mechanised brigade with only 1,600 footsoldiers.) They fought a magnificent war and now just want to go home. Stories are numerous of US troops sitting in tanks parked in front of the public buildings whilst looters go about their business behind them."

Yet the week before Rumsfeld had been cancelling planned extra troop deloyments. He wanted to take out 50,000 troops after 90 days and another 50,000 every 30 days until everyone was home. By the time Garner arrived, most of the ministries he was due to take over had been looted to destruction.

There was huge anxiety in Downing Street. "Tony was tearing his hair out," said one party official. "Tony ... could see what needed to be done, but he did not have the levers."

A senior British diplomat involved said: "You cannot win a country without any security, and there were never enough troops on the ground. Rumsfeld was against it for Vietnam heritage reasons and his peculiar administrative style." The US force shrank from 150,000 in June 2003 to 115,000 by February 2004.

If Britain did press for a bigger troop deployment, and Hoon concedes he has no memory of doing so, the UK had no impact. "I would describe trying to influence the Americans a little like a multidimensional jigsaw puzzle, in the sense that there were parts of that system that we had very good access and influence over."

But within two weeks of Sawers arriving, the Americans made two critical errors. The head of the new CPA, Paul Bremer, sacked the top three layers of the civil service and disbanded the army. The two orders made 500,000 people unemployed, removed one of the few unifying institutions in the country and decapitated the police service.

These orders were carried out against British advice. It is not even clear that they had been agreed with Bush or, in the case of the army, even with Rumsfeld. Bremer contends that the Iraqi army had melted away, and the order "was meant to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that the underpinnings of the Saddam administration had been destroyed". But he concedes the order removing Saddam loyalists from the civil service was bungled by giving responsibility for implementation to the Iraqi governing council, the group of Iraqis advising the US and including the politician Ahmed Chalabi. Bremer says the policy "targeted only the top 1%" of Ba'ath party members, but "under Chalabi's direction, the Iraqi de-Ba'athification council had expanded the order, for example, by depriving thousands of teachers of their jobs".

According to Greenstock, "perhaps the Brits should have spoken up more loudly with our former colonial experience, because we learned to make law and order the number one priority when we have a situation to mend."

Sawers, in a memo in late June 2003, revealed Bremer was having regrets. "He has twice said to President Bush that he is concerned the drawdown of US-UK troops has gone too far and we cannot afford further reductions." The CPA never recovered.

Labour officials in Downing Street said Blair had most influence over Bush when they were together, one-to-one. One says: "That is why he went over [to Washington] so much. The weekly video conference was no substitute, partly because there were so many people listening on either side. But Bush was straight to deal with and did not play games, but it was up to him to make the right decisions. In the end he didn't."

Blair went on to win his third election, but he was never to rid himself of Iraq.